Don’t Emulate This Guy
Slate, a once-semi-readable website, published a 2,925-word tome on Tuesday by a guy who is really sad because he managed rack up $200,000 in student loan debt by getting a useless degree at a fancypants private college and then, by borrowing more cash to be a graduate student.
The bitter, billowing borrower is Samuel Garner — currently a bioethicist at a Washington, D.C. nonprofit.
Garner’s tale of woe and world-historical budgetary stupidity begins — as he tells it, in excruciating detail — when he was a high school senior. He was a “consumer” of the “vacuous platitudes” on college brochures, and so he excitedly applied to Connecticut College — a school which currently charges a comprehensive fee of $62,965 per year.
“My siblings and I had the privilege of expecting we would attend private colleges,” Garner explains, even though his family had become “financially stressed” when he was in high school.
This financial stress notwithstanding, in 2003 Garner went off the Connecticut College — which was then charging comprehensive fees in the $40,000-ish range — and carelessly signed “for these federal loans each semester” without once, he admits, bothering to look at the papers he was signing to find out how much he was borrowing.
“Like so many students, I thought signing loan documents was just a routine,” the graduate of an allegedly elite college — who was a full-fledged adult at the time — now writes. “Having no appreciation of financial adulthood, I didn’t really understand what these loans were or what repaying them would actually entail.”
He blames college officials for making “no serious effort to explain” the paperwork he himself signed on multiple occasions. He says his “middle-class” parents both didn’t understand the “student loan terrain” and, somehow, at the same time, “minimized” his “understanding of what it would take to pay for school.”
Garner chose to ditch a planned major in biology for a major in music performance. He also minored in philosophy.
Eventually, he decided to pursue an academic career in bioethics. That’s a swanky word for a sub-sub-branch of philosophy.
“Academia was the setting I knew, so that became my plan,” he writes.
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